Up late talking games & writing? You're...

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Family: Today was probably the best Father's Day I've ever had in my life. It wasn't that my wife surprised me with tickets to Australia or that I won the lottery or anything, it was just a really great family-centered day.
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When I woke up this morning, Whittaker was in a great mood -- all smiles and baby coos. The wife and I just hung out in bed, and my other son Rhys came to join us when he woke up.
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In case you're a newcomer to this blog, Rhys is my son from a previous relationship and lives with his mother quite a great distance away. I only get to see him three times a year, so just having my entire family together on this day made all the difference.
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Food: Speaking of today being a great day, one other thing that really put it over the top was the dinner.
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The wife and I were laying in bed last night and scanning Food Network. At around 10 or 10:30 pm, Paula Deen came on and started cooking some teriyaki skewers, and I'll be damned if she didn’t give me a fierce, nearly undeniable craving for the stuff. I was halfway tempted to run out to the grocery store and cook it on the spot, but my calmer side won over and we did it today instead.
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There were no leftovers.
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Here's the menu, with a quick recipe breakdown:
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Teriyaki Pork Skewers: pork tenderloin, trimmed lean and sliced thin – maybe ¼ inch thick, marinated for 2hrs in a mix of low-sodium soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, rum, vanilla extract, molasses, brown sugar and water. Skewer them fairly flat and grill about eight minutes on each side, basting with the marinade liberally.
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Pineapple Salsa: green onions sliced small mixed with diced pineapple chunks in pineapple juice.
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Cucumber Salad: one cucumber (seeds removed) and sliced in C-shapes, ¼ of a red onion, and two diced tomatoes (jelly removed). Mix vegetables and marinate in a mix of rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, sesame seeds and white sugar.
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Cook up some steamed rice (Thai jasmine is my personal favorite) and you're good to go…
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Games: I gave it an honest try, but Lair just flat-out sucks so badly that I couldn't force myself to sit through it.
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I think I got to the sixth or seventh mission, and things were just falling apart all over the place -- I mean, the dragon only seemed to listen to my control inputs sometimes, it was nearly impossible to tell where certain enemies were, and the camera was janking all like it was being manned by somebody in the middle of having a seizure.
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I seriously wanted this game to be good; I mean, what's not to like about giant dragons razing ground troops with streams of fire and taking to the skies at will, but this game is so fundamentally flawed, so completely broken from the ground up that there's just no salvaging it.
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I was hoping against hope that the analog control patch would resolve the issues that most people seemed to have with it, but this is one case where all of the naysayers had it absolutely correct. After sitting through as much of the game as I did, any reviewer giving Lair more than a 4 (*koff*Play Magazine*koff) needs to be taken out back of the shed and beaten about the head and neck with a ratings stick until they learn to tell the difference between what's good and what's bad.
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Like the Good Book says: spare the rod, enable the crappy reviewer.
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Misc: My dog is gay.
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I’ve had suspicions over the last few years that have been reinforced by a good friend of mine every time she's dog-sat for me, but proof positive came today.
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While visiting, a friend brought along her dogs, one male and one female (in heat, no less.) We were prepared to keep our male from mounting her female, but we didn't need to worry… my dog went absolutely crazy over this other canine penis in the house, and it was all we could do to keep him from violating the visitor.
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Seriously, it was absolutely ridiculous how hard he was struggling to get some quality time with the male, and how completely he was ignoring the female. It got to the point, in fact, that when I turned around for a few seconds and came back, my dog was performing what I can only describe as ‘muzzle fellatio’ on this new fellow as the female sat dejectedly in a corner.
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Everyone in the room was a little embarrassed at the slurping sounds, so we separated the two and sort of laughed it off, although we couldn't leave the two dogs unsupervised after that… not that we necessarily objected to the dog expressing himself, but we did have small children in the room and no one wanted to have that particular discussion today.
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What a wonderfully diverse and interesting thing life is.
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